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Some of the best elite-calibre rugby played in Canada will be on display Saturday and I’m not talking about the B.C. championship match that will pit perennial powerhouse James Bay Athletic Association of Victoria against the gritty Capilanos from North Vancouver.

Nope, the game to watch will be the 11 a.m. senior women’s premier league provincial championship game between the Velox Valkyries of Saanich and Burnaby Lake Rugby Club at Klahanie Park in West Vancouver.

You’d never know it from the abysmal coverage women’s elite-level rugby gets from the deeply conservative culture of mainstream sports media, but in my opinion, the women are simply outstanding and in relative terms are actually outperforming their male counterparts on the world rugby stage.

The Velox side, for example, has won its last 18 games in a row and is a scoring machine that’s been averaging more than 40 points a game while allowing less than six. Burnaby Lake has a similar record, averaging just under 40 points a game while allowing just over seven.

This Saturday’s Harris Memorial Cup match, for example, sees Velox trying for an undefeated season. To achieve that goal, the Island club will have to defeat last year’s provincial champs, who have themselves lost only one game — way back in March — to this weekend’s challengers for their crown.

Burnaby Lake won its provincial title by defeating Velox in last year’s cup final. So the feelings are intense in both locker-rooms.

Talk about the clash of the titans.

I went out last weekend to watch Velox demolish Bayside 36-8 in a game that was a lot more competitive and harder played than the final score indicates.

The Velox and Bayside women merited one line in the local newspaper at the end of all the coverage about the men’s games.

The game I saw deserved much more than that.

It was fast, spirited and hard-hitting, but clean and much closer to the textbook style for which coaches strive, from New Zealand’s All Blacks to Andy Capp’s coarse rugby side.

Maybe the women bring less swollen ego to the game than the men with their professional aspirations, but the women’s passing was crisp as can be and the play for tactical advantage by both sides was selfless and intelligent. It was a joy to watch.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising.

The Valkyries — and Burnaby, for that matter — have produced a number of the national team’s star players.

Canada’s women, for example, achieved a No. 1 ranking in world standings to start 2012, first blowing through a stellar field to win the first International Rugby Board-sanctioned women’s seven-a-side tournament by beating England at Dubai last December, and then winning the U.S. Sevens at Las Vegas and finishing third in the hard-fought Hong Kong Sevens won by England earlier this year.

Our men, on the other hand, have been stagnating in world standings for a decade.

They ranked 13th in the IRB world standings in 2003 and that’s where they sit in 2012.

This isn’t to disparage the male athletes.

To be sure, the competition is deep indeed at the top of world rugby rankings, crowded as they are by behemoths like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, France, Wales and Ireland.

But Argentina, once of similar ranking to Canada, has thrust its way into the elite top 10. So have little Tonga, population 105,000; Samoa, population 191,000; and Italy, which only began competing in Europe’s Six Nations Championship in 2000. Coming up fast are countries like Russia, Romania, Namibia and Spain.

So the hard truth is that while Canada’s men have largely been treading water, the women, with far fewer resources at their disposal and the prejudice of hidebound media and traditionalist rugby officials to overcome, have really put on a most impressive performance against top world competitors.

Seven-a-side rugby, the fast, scaled-down version that’s all about speed, tactics and the ability to make open field tackles — a version at which Canadians excel — is to become an official Olympic sport at the 2016 games in Rio. I’d make a bet that some of the future female stars you’ll be seeing will be on display this Saturday at Klahanie Park.

Oh, the men, just in case you are interested, will be playing for their championships on the same field after the women have finished. The Velox Valhallians take on Kamloops for the Division III title at 12:30 p.m., Meralomas meet Castaway Wanderers of Oak Bay for the Ceili Cup at 2 p.m. and JBAA meets Capilano for the Rounsefell Cup at 4 p.m.

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